As most of you might know Discord is implementing a new update which starting in march will require users to verify their age. All the current user will be shown only "teen-appropriate" content by default. You can read more about this on their official press release here.
This is over all a terrible update, and I am guessing a lot of people won't let AI "estimate" their age or send their IDs to third parties vendors. Especially after a fuck up (data breach) they had not too long ago which leaked peoples ID, faces, emails, and other stuff like that.
The better alternative I want to talk about is called XMPP (or also called by some Jabber. Not to be confused with a software called Jabber created by the company Cisco.)
XMPP is a decentralized federated messaging standard developed in 1999 (It being developed in the late 90s does not mean it's out of date, it's regularly updated including the clients
, XMPP is also a lot better privacy terms, and I will explain why bellow.But let's start off how XMPP really works, the best comparison I could make is to email, you can use someone else server, or host your own, and they all will be able to talk with each other so if I am on my own XMPP server hosted under purplebored.pl I will be able to message and interact from users using conversations.im. JID's or your XMPP handles are also very similar to email ones, here is one of my for example: niko@telepath.im.
Okay now let's talk about privacy, XMPP has multiple ways to encrypt messages (and calls on some clients.), there is the now out of date, and not really supported OTR, there is also PGP or OpenPGP which is also not widely used any more, by far the best one, and most popular one is OMEMO. OMEMO is based on signals encryption, and it's pretty much just turn it on and forget about it, You can also use it to encrypt MUCs. MUC = Multi User Chat btw so a group chat, you can have big public MUCs which are mostly non encrypted or small private MUCs with your friend which can be OMEMO encrypted. To use OMEMO on a MUC you need have public JIDs turned on, most public MUCs have the JIDs hidden only for moderators. This means that someone in a MUC can't see your JID, and can't contact you without you giving them your JID first. This is a great way to prevent spam or unwanted messages.
Also XMPP is very light weight, works great on older machines, bad internet connection, and stuff like that. Same with hosting an XMPP server! It's very light weight, and you have many options. Same with the clients so let me talk about that now!
There are many clients from XMPP for all the popular platforms, for Windows you have clients like Gajim, on Linux you have clients like Gajim or Dino, on Android you have conversaiton or Monocles, and on iOS you have monal. There are also some clients for web users like: conversejs, fluux messenger (also available on Desktop
), or Movim, HECK even if you use an old Blackberry there is a java client for that too !I am terrible at writing (as you can see from this post lmfao) so I don't know what to write more, but I will drop some resources bellow for anyone intrested.
Jabber and why you should use it - Greatsword.xyz
Very basic how to Jabber - Greatsword.xyz
Offical XMPP site.
Public list of decent XMPP providers
A XMPP server compliance tester.
Setting up an XMPP server.
If you have any questions about XMPP feel free to ask them here, and I will try my best to response in a reasonable amount of times
